Why Optimal Health for Your Companion Animal is All About Energy

The following is the text of a presentation I gave to a group of veterinary students in CA. I have left the areas that engender further discussion (anywhere I ask for “questions”)

The only current link to this page is from the forum for my Introduction to Veterinary Homeopathy course that will be given at Your Healthy Pet in Newtown, CT.

Enjoy!!

It’s All About Energy:

An energetic model for physiologic homeostasis and how to incorporate it into your veterinary practice

1- **This one slide really exemplifies the main goal that I have for this evening. That goal is for us all to expand our understanding of health and healing beyond the dominant biomedical (and vet) model.

Modern medicine has made amazing progress in the description and manipulation of the pathological changes that occur in the body during dz, e.g molecular biological discoveries, transplantation and genomic science, etc. Unfortunately, healing our patients is no longer the main priority in medicine. #2 and any vet or MD that closely observes his/her patients over time knows that we are usually only covering up symptoms. As a scientist, the lack of any medical model that describes the fundamental mechanism by which the body heals is very disturbing to me. It doesn’t even provide any framework to understand why we get sick and die.

To practice most effectively, we need to know *exactly* what is the difference (aside from post mortem changes) between a healthy older animal and the same animal who dies unexpectedly! #3,4, 5

R. Aidan Martin “Biology of sharks and rays:
#6 Living versus non-living is one of the most fundamental distinctions we can make. For the most part, this distinction is an easy one to make: a person, shark, or tree is clearly alive, while a rock, cloud, or stream is clearly not. #6a- Yet defining life itself is not so easy – it is, in fact, one of our all-time great puzzles.

#7- [Most biology texts list a series of characteristics that all living things seem to possess: metabolism (the exchange of energy and materials with the environment, including energy/food acquisition and waste excretion), growth, responsiveness to stimuli, self-maintenance (including homeostatic [physiological balance], immunological and anti-predatory mechanisms), movement (on at least a cellular level), and reproduction. But the characteristics of life is not the same thing as what life is.

This uncertainty is encountered only by our materialistic and reductionistic dominant scientific medicine. Questions??

Once we realize that mere descriptions of the physiologic processes involved in are not the same as life, we have taken a critical first all impt step. #8

The theory and practice of one branch of science (especially medicine) does not necessarily overlap with and inform other disciplines. Thus the theoretical and predictive reﬁnements of physics, embodied in relativity theory and quantum mechanics , for example, currently have very little bearing on conventional biomedicine.

#9-The currently dominant model, often termed the biomedical model, of which the double-blind placebo-controlled trial is the gold standard, is materialistic and reductionistic. It is based on theories arrived at by deductive reasoning.

The therapies developed from these deduced theories (Peterson story) are based on the presumption that the behaviour of the body can be entirely known or accurately calculated, simply from complete knowledge of its present conditions. According to materialistic medicine, our bodies are just like any other machine that wears out. The dominant scientific medical community thinks that the body, like a machine, can be understood as the sum of its parts. Take the machine apart and put it back together again correctly and it will function as it did before. #10- Dr Frankenstein would have been a reductionist like this. Clearly, living organisms do not function by such
rules.

Unfortunately, at the moment there seems to be little alternative. This is partly due to the lack of perception of an overwhelming need for a new paradigm amongst
conventional medical practitioners. Scientiﬁc revolutions rarely begin in the dominant paradigm, especially where that paradigm is deemed to be
successful. The adherents of a dominant paradigm are usually the last to perceive the poverty of their ideas in the face of new facts, mainly because from
neglect or active suppression, those facts remain hidden from them. Based on this historical closed mindedness of the dominant school of medicine (which at one time actually banned conventional doctors from associating w/homeopaths-even if married)

“it is reasonable to ask if homeopathy (or any other CAVM that espouses vitalism) can be “understood” within a scientific framework.” This dogmatic ( pun fully intended) view is just one of the many reasons why we, as scientific veterinarians, must expand our thinking in order to fully uphold our oath as veterinarians. #11 Any questions?

Medicine based on Vitalism, on the other hand, elegantly explains life, dz and death. #12,13

Vitalism has a long history in medical philosophies: most traditional healing practices (like TCM and ayurveda) posited that disease was the result of some imbalance in the vital energies which distinguish living from non-living matter. Unfortunately the current medical model views any energetic model of the body as witchcraft #14

15- Samuel Hahnemann was an undisputed scientific genius who painstakingly observed his patients for many years prior to his development of homeopathic healing. He promoted this vitalistic view of disease. In one of his early articles (even before he wrote the Organon which elegantly outlines the science of homeopathy he wrote “…they are solely spirit-like (dynamic) derangements of the spirit-like power (the vital principle) that animates the human body.”

In the first two paragraphs of the Organon H challenges us to be true healers of the sick by saying : #16-The physician’s high and only mission is to restore the sick to health, to cure, as it is termed.
#17 Aphorism 2
The highest ideal of cure is rapid, gentle and permanent restoration of the health, or removal and annihilation of the
disease in its whole extent, in the shortest, moist reliable, and most harmless way, on easily comprehensible principle.

I still wonder what those principles are. Can anyone tell me…?

The simple model I’d like to discuss today inductively explains what we observe in the clinic (vs. deducing a model based on a theory which is “The gold standard”). Before we get to that however, I’d like to point out that energetic healing when used holistically results in improved OVERALL health Not just improvement of one symptom #18. I strongly urge that you read some of George V’s work as he describes #19, 20, 21

From the gyroscope article that I sent: #22
Consider a strong Vital Force. It resists the ‘morbiﬁc inﬂuences’ (in today’s language, stressors) that lead it to express disease. #23, 24, 25 Either they do not aﬀect it or it reacts strongly to them. In terms of our analogy, this is
equivalent to a gyroscope whose ﬂywheel has such a high rate of spin that it stands upright. In terms of the metaphor, ‘resists morbiﬁc inﬂuences’ means, that the
upright gyroscope strongly resists being pushed over by outside forces applied to it, or it wobbles before settling back into its original upright posture. This wobbling phase would be equivalent to an expression of an acute disease. 26

Now consider a weaker Vital Force. It has more diﬃculty resisting stressors. it is less able to resist being pushed over by applied outside forces, so that its
recovery is incomplete.

the gyroscope analogy can also be used to help illuminate some of the more disturbing health aspects of early 21st century life #28, such as the increasing
incidence of autoimmune disease, allergy and problems
associated with antibiotic abuse. 29, 30 (This slide 31 by the way shows many common allergic symptoms that are tx w/homeo) To function properly, the immune system (eﬀectively part of the Vital Force) needs to be able to diﬀerentiate between ‘self and non-self ’ inﬂuences, ‘morbiﬁc’ or otherwise. 32 Childhood illnesses could partly serve the purpose of priming and
‘educating’ the Vital Force in these diﬀerences. This is not a rapid process. In gyroscopic terms, it would be equivalent to the ﬂywheel taking time to reach
maximum ‘healthy’ speed. A vitality underexposed to the educational (speeding up) eﬀects of childhood illnesses, or over-exposed to the suppressive (braking) eﬀects of too-early vaccination and/
or abuse by conventional medication, cannot work at its optimum eﬃciency.
Questions?
These slides #33 show the graph which I draw for most of my new clients. It starts out with a simple sin wave which represents a healthy state of balance. We all will have days where we feel great, with good energy, mood and no physical complaints. On other days however we may not sleep well, be restless, and have other minor physical discomforts. Over time however, the good and not so good days balance out such that we consider ourselves “healthy”. #34

The next step is to consider what happens in response to some stimulus. 35 This might be from anything like an infectious agent, an injury, a strong emotional state like fear or grief. The red arrow is the stress which shifts the blue equilibrium. The new peaks and valleys that result are the symptoms which arise in response to this shift, in other words, dis-ease. It is critical to realize that symptoms are the language of the body and should never be suppressed. In most cases (like during a cold or flu) the new state eventually resolves and equilibrium or health is restored.
If however symptoms at any level are ignored, palliated or suppressed over the life of the individual, the VF becomes irreparably disordered, end-stage diseases like cancer and organ failure occur, and the spark of life ceases to exist. #37 If we intervene with correctly chosen and properly dosed homeo remedies however, life goes on. #38

In summary, once we expand our thinking to include the energetic basis of life we can fully help our patients. 39 We will then become the healers that we were meant to be and have lots of happy, long-lived patients. 40 Questions?

If there is interest, I’d like to make a brief digression as to why pharmacologic agents (which act physiologically and usually not energetically) usually do not cure:

From Radical Healing:Drugs are most often chemical compounds (usually synthetic) designed to alter metabolic reactions. They interfere with targeted biochemical process in your body. This may reduce or even get rid of certain symptoms, but generally this happens through “biochemical manhandling”. Drugs set out to wrench around a metabolic reaction, when something in the overall system is trying to make it go a different way. That “something” that keeps pushing to make things go the way they were before you took the drug in usually an outmoded way to functioning. But since it operates on a level of organization higher than the molecular, it is not set right by the approach and continues to push. You may even feel the conflict between the action of the drug and the impulse within you, so that the drug effect feels “foreign”.

Remedies (NB-here he is not specifically referring to homeo remedies) are quite different in these actions. They are natural substances that are chosen with the intent to correct an underlying problem. They prompt and support a “reorganization of the basic operating plan”, so that the underlying push toward disorder is eliminated. This is often done by bringing the disorder out so that it is more obvious and cam be resolved: your fever may kill off microbes associated with your illness; the anger may sweep your interpersonal issues out into the open, where they demand attention and resolution. As a result, you attain a fuller sense of well-being and vitality, and the energy and motivation to move enthusiastically to the next challenge in your life.